Because some RSS aggregators use the <link> tag to uniquely
identify an entry even if there is also a perfectly good
<guid>. If all the entries in a feed point to the same page,
unless I do something to differentiate the <link>s, some
aggregators will think all the entries in the feed are the same
entry. Thus, the HTML anchors, which use the text in the <guid>
to make the <link> unique.

Will you create such-and-such a feed for me?

Not unless it turns out I'm interested in using the feed myself. I
don't want to create a bunch of feeds that I don't use myself, because
then I won't notice when they break.

If you can't get me interested and you know Python, grab a copy of
Scrape 'N' Feed and Beautiful Soup, and make your own
screen-scraping parser generator.

What happened to all the feeds you had here before?

Almost all of them have been rendered moot by official feeds. A few
of them were an order of magnitude too much work to keep running.

I crave more screen-scraped RSS feeds! Where are other sites
that do this same sort of thing?

interglacial.com has a lot of feeds including several I was going to make myself.

Why don't you have a feed that you can use to notify us of new
additions to the Automat? That would be all meta, dude.

It doesn't happen often enough.

What is an Automat?

The Automat
was a restaurant chain where instead of cooking food to order, cooks
were always making all the food on the menu and serving it through
vending machines (as in the picture on the
Syndication Automat front page). Freshness and consistency were
obsessions. I always liked the idea of the Automat, and this site is
similar in that I work behind the scenes to put websites into RSS
feeds and keep them fresh.

There is a neo-automat
restaurant in New York, but it's not very good. Maybe the original
Automat wasn't very good either.

This document (source) is part of Crummy, the webspace of Leonard Richardson (contact information). It was last modified on Saturday, August 18 2007, 02:44:20 Nowhere Standard Time and last built on Tuesday, March 31 2015, 22:00:01 Nowhere Standard Time.